Fortunately, though, the attack was countered by Akamai’s DDoS security that has been put on Krebs’ website. And according to Akamai, it was nearly double the size of the largest attack they’d seen previously clocked in earlier this year at 336 Gbps.

There are some indications that this attack was launched with the help of a botnet that has enslaved a large number of hacked so-called “Internet of Things,” (IoT) devices — routers, IP cameras and digital video recorders (DVRs) that are exposed to the Internet and protected with weak or hard-coded passwords.

Brian Krebs speculated that this attack might be retaliation for his recent posts on the takedown of the DDoS-for-hire service vDOS, because Krebs stated that some of the POST request attacks that came as part of this 620 Gbps attack included the string “freeapplej4ck,” a reference to the nickname used by one of the vDOS co-owners.

Krebs is no stranger to attacks of all types — a hacker forum once used crashing Krebs on Security as a way to audition for their site and also a Ukranian hacker sent drugs to his home and called the police for his arrest.